Jake Vella suffers from a rare hormonal condition that causes him to rapidly gain weight despite eating healthy and doing regular exercise. There is nothing anyone can do to stop the weight gain, but in order to stop the process and stay alive, the 7-year-old boy competes in triathlons.

Jake’s parents first noticed there was something wrong with him three years ago, when he gained about 20 pounds in just six months. He kept putting on weight despite eating only salad. In 2015, Jake was diagnosed with ROHHAD (Rapid-onset Obesity with Hypothalamic dysfunction, Hypoventilation and Autonomic Dysregulation), a rare condition that affects the nervous system and causes rapid weight gain, as well as an inability to regulate body temperature and maintain normal water levels. It can cause tumors to develop, and Jake already has one on his back. Unfortunately, the condition is currently incurable and the life expectancy of sufferers ranges between 5 and 9 years.

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Hava Celebic, an 80-year-old woman from the Bosnian village of Crnjevo, claims to be somewhat of a miracle worker. She is allegedly able to clean people’s eyes of various debris using only her tongue.

Celebic, who is known as “Nana Hava” in her home village, says she learned the bizarre medical procedure a long time ago, from another woman, also called Hava. She has been cleaning people’s eyes by licking their eyeballs, for decades now, and claims to have been sought out by people of all nationalities, from Russians to Americans. Many of Hava’s patients turn to her out of desperation, after modern medical procedures fail to solve their problems. But her tongue is apparently infallible when it comes to locating and removing various debris – pieces of lead, iron, coal, sawdust and glass – from people’s eyes.

“There are a lot of those that modern medicine could not help,” Nana Hava said. “They came to me out of the hospital with swollen eyes, I clean them and remove the speck.” The tongue healer claims she has helped cure over 5,000 people in her lifetime. In fact, Hava is so valuable to those who believe in her gift that she’s been told that when she dies. villagers will cut off her tongue so that it can continue to cure people.

So, you’re probably curious about how Nana Hava uses her tongue to clean people’s eyes. It’s fairly simple, actually. She starts by sterilizing her mouth with alcohol, after which she will ask the patient to hold their eyelid raised, and begin searching for speck in the eye socket with the tip of her tongue. Sounds pretty disgusting, doesn’t it. Her kids seems to agree, which is why she has been unable to pass down the bizarre practice to them.

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Otona Maki, or ‘adult wrapping’, is a Japanese therapeutic method of correcting posture and alleviating body stiffness by wrapping the human body in a large piece of cloth that emulates the comfortable feel of a mother’s womb.

Well-known for their long work hours, many Japanese people develop posture problems and body stiffness. For a long time, getting massages and stretching have been the most popular ways of dealing with these issues, but now someone claims to have come up with an even better solution. Otona Maki is a new and intriguing way of improving posture and making your body more flexible than ever, while at the same time helping practitioners relax by recreating the comfortable feel of a mother’s womb.

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29-year-old Johanna Watkins suffers from an extremely rare condition which makes allergic to literally hundreds of things, including the scent of her husband. For the past year, she has been living alone in a specially-built “safe zone” of her house, and claims that every times she leaves this space her body “goes into attack” mode.

Johanna met her husband Scott five years ago, at Hope Academy, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked as a first grade teacher Scott as a second grade teacher. They got married in 2013 and started making plans about their life together, but just two years into their marriage, the allergies that Johanna had suffered from all her life started getting considerably worse. At first they though it was just food allergies, and changed their diet, but that didn’t help. In 2015, she was diagnosed with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), a rare genetic disorder that causes her body to develop life-threatening anaphylactic reactions to virtually everything.

MCAS causes  mast cells, which release chemicals that tell our immune system how to react to various stimuli, to build up and go haywire. Basically Johanna’s mast cells release the wrong chemicals, to the wrong place, at the wrong time. The cells react to all sorts of triggers, releasing chemicals that overwhelm the body, leading to anaphylaxis. Unfortunately, the condition was discovered just nine years ago, so little is known about it.

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A team of doctors who recently performed surgery on an elderly woman suffering from severe gastrointestinal problems, were shocked to discover that her stomach was clogged with plastic threads that she had been eating for lack of actual food.

Tara Devi, a 52-year-old deaf-mute woman from the Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh, India, was brought to the emergency room of the regional hospital in Solan by a local who had noticed she was ill and suffering great pain. After running a series of tests, doctors spotted a sort of spherical mass tuck in her stomach, which they assumed was a large ball of hair and recommended immediate surgery to remove it. However, during the procedure, doctors discovered that what they had believed to be hair was actually a ball of tangled plastic threads from plastic gunny bags. Some of the plastic threads that formed the bird nest-like mass clogging up the woman’s intestines were reportedly up to 7-feet long.

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Seeing his wife go through the excruciatingly painful process of passing kidney stones, a farmer in Jiangxi Province, China, created an ingenious bed that flips over and vibrates to help dislodge the stones.

Zhu Qinghua, a 52-year-old rice farmer from Jiangxi had been thinking of ways of helping his wife since 1993, when she had her left kidney removed because of kidney failure, and stones were discovered in her right one. Doctors told them that surgery to remove the stones was too dangerous for a person with one kidney, so she was advised to eliminate them naturally before they became too large. Zhu says inspiration struck in 1997, when doctors advised his wife to stand upside down for a few minutes every day, to help dislodge the kidney stones. That’s when he started working on his patented kidney stone-removing bed.

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Cao Yinpeng, an 8-year-old from Xuzhou, East China’s Jiangsu province, underwent a rigorous fattening up regiment, in order to qualify for a bone marrow transplant necessary to save his father’s life.

Earlier this year, Cao’s father was diagnosed with leukemia and doctors told the family that he needed a hematopoietic stem cell transplant to survive. Unfortunately, there were no compatible donors within the China Marrow Donor Program, the Asian country’s marrow bank. The man’s parents were a match, but had to be ruled out due to their advanced age, which only left 8-year-old Cao Yinpeng. China’s marrow donor program website states that donors should be between the ages of 18 and 45, but doctors do make exceptions in desperate situations such as this. But while they agreed to operate on the boy to harvest the life-saving stem cells, they did make it clear that he had to reach the minimum donor weight requirement of 45kg to qualify for the procedure.

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“Who says that health foods have to taste bad?” That’s the question that inspired Italian cardiologist Dr. Valerio Sanguigni to create a tasty ice-cream with proven health benefits, including improved sport performance in youth.

It’s a known medical fact that can help improve heart health and prevent certain diseases, with some studies even linking them to living a longer life. Staples of Italian cuisine, like olive oil, tomatoes and red wine have been credited for contributing to the longevity of the Italian population, whose number of centenarians has tripled in less than 15 years. But despite their documented benefits, Dr. Sanguini believed that many antioxidant-rich health foods lost a considerable share of their properties before reaching people’s tables. He decided to solve this problem using ice-cream.

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According to a recently published medical report, a 47-year-old American man who ate a burger smothered in Ghost Pepper puree ended up with a large hole in his esophagus.

The report published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine mentions that the unnamed man ate ‘ghost peppers’, also known as Bhut jolokia, in puree form, smothered on top of a burger, part of an eating contest. Soon after finishing the scorching hot meal, he began to experience violent retching and vomiting, as well as severe abdominal and chest pain. As these symptoms kept getting worse, the man called emergency responders, who took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Boerhaave syndrome, or spontaneous esophageal rupture.

An abdomen and pelvic scan revealed a build up of air, fluid and food inside the man’s body, so doctors decided to perform emergency surgery. They discovered a 2.5cm tear in the left side of his throat and had to insert a tube into the rupture to aid his breathing. The tube remained in place for two weeks, while the man’s wound healed. He ended up spending another nine days in the hospital, before being discharged with a feeding tube in place.

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Graham Smith, an engineer from Lancashire, England, was recently in the news for performing surgery on himself to remove eight millimeters of stitches left by surgeons inside his body years ago, after operations to correct it were cancelled twice.

Smith had underwent bowel surgery 15 years ago, and was left with stitches protruding through the skin on his abdomen. He first brought up the issue with the hospital where he had the original surgery in 2011, but he was put on a waiting list and an operation to fix the problem was cancelled twice. Rather than waiting for his turn and risk of dying of septicaemia, the crafty engineer decided to operate on himself, using modified titanium instruments he sourced from a dentist friend.

“I tried to do it through the normal channels… but I had septicaemia,” Mr. Smith told the BBC. “I didn’t make the decision lightly – I was desperate, but I had to take control of it and I was not prepared to sit and die on a waiting list.”

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42-year-old Jarnail Singh was recently admitted to The Corporate Hospital in Gurdaspur, India, after complaining of severe stomach pains and general weakness. What he failed to mention was that he had voluntarily swallowed 40 sharp metal knives over the past couple of months.

After asking Singh a few questions and performing the routine checkup, doctors were puzzled about the cause of the pain, so they did an ultrasound. That revealed a large solid mass in the man’s stomach, which led medical staff to believe he was suffering from cancer. To confirm the diagnostic, they performed a gastroscopy – inserting an endoscopic camera in his stomach. The mass appeared metallic and doctors could identify shard of blades and wood, which was very unusual.

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Ira Saxena, a young girl from Colchester, England, can’t stop sneezing. From the moment she wakes up, she sneezes over 10 times per minute, and the unusual condition seems to be getting worse. Her mother is desperate to help, but doctors aren’t even sure what is causing the unusual sneezing bouts.

Ira’s mysterious condition kicked in one morning, three weeks ago, when Ira woke up and started sneezing. Her mother Priya says the sneezing wasn’t so bad at first, but it quickly progressed to a point where the girl wasn’t even able to attend school anymore. She now sneezes about 8,000 times per day, sometimes up to 10 times a minute, until she falls a sleep. “The one blessing is she sleeps fine, it is the only time when she is not sneezing and she can sleep right through the night,” her mother said.

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All astronauts have perfect eyesight before traveling to outer space, but some years ago medical tests revealed that their vision is severely impaired when they return. The exact cause of this problem is yet to be determined.

In 2005, about halfway through his mission working on the International Space Station, astronaut John Phillips looked out the window at Earth and noticed something strange. Although his vision had always been perfect, our planet seemed blurry and he had problem focusing on it. He didn’t report his problem to ground control thinking it was just temporary and would go away after a while, only it didn’t. When he returned to Earth, rigorous tests revealed that his eyesight had gone from 20/20 to 20/100.

To shed some light on this issue, NASA put Phillips through a series of procedures, including MRIs, retinal scans, neurological tests and a spinal tap. They found that not only had his vision deteriorated, but his eyes had changed as well – his optic nerves were inflamed, the back of his eyes had become flatter and his eyeballs had choroidal folds, which are like stretch marks. After six months, Phillips’ eyesight improved to 20/50, but remained there for the last 11 years. He went from being the guy with the best vision, the first one in the car to read a street sign to not being able to pass a DMV exam without glasses.

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Patrick Magno, from San Diego, California, recently won the grand prize in a fitness competition after he managed to lose 49 pounds and get into enviable physical shape in just three months.

After a medical exam revealed that he was 30 per cent body fat and at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Patrick Magno decided it was time for a drastic lifestyle change. He was a social worker and had to remove children from broken homes, abusive parents and other harmful situations for a living, a job that he says had a severe effect on his lifestyle and overall health. So he quit, proposed to his girlfriend of six years and set his sights on improving his health so he wouldn’t end up like his father, who had to deal with the terrible symptoms of diabetes.

“I couldn’t even recognize myself,” he said. “I was embarrassed. I was disgusted. I was ashamed that I had let myself get to this point.” So when he learned about Bodybuilding.com’s 250k Challenge, a contest that has entrants transform their bodies with the help of grueling physical workouts, meal-plans and supplements, for the chance to win a substantial sum of money, he decided to go all in. ‘hey said they would give tons of nutritional meal plans, options, workout guides and fitness advice absolutely free of charge, and offer a $250,000 (£190,000) in prize money. It sounded a little too good to be true,” Magno remembers.

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36-year-old Richard Kimberley, of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, has been running his “csmicros” computer repair business for the last 20 years, but he plans to close it down on July 22nd, claiming radiation signals from wireless technology have given him a rare condition known as electro-hypersensitivity (EHS).

Ever since he launched his business in 1996, Richard has been working around phones, computers and Wi-Fi signals on a regular basis, and he believes the constant exposure to technology has taken a toll on his health. “Due to an over-exposure to the radiation from wireless technology, my health has declined to the point where I cannot continue with the business that I have spent my life building,” he says. “I’d wake up five or six times in a night, my joints were aching, I’d have headaches during the day and my memory was awful – I felt atrocious and I had no idea why. I’ve had to rely on staff for the past 18 months since becoming EHS. I have persevered, battling with electro-hypersensitivity for as long as I can.”

Mr. Kimberley said that his problems began in 2013, when he moved into a dual shop and house premise on Stourport Road, Kidderminster. He started experiencing black outs, headaches and extreme tiredness, yet his condition improved when he removed wireless technology from the house. But wireless technology is everywhere these days, and his electro-hypersensitivity has made it really hard for Richard to live a normal life. Since October last year, he has been living in a van fitted with aluminium lining to block out radiation signals. He says the only way to avoid feeling sick is to park the van in spots he feels are safe, every night.

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